Sally Jessy Raphael

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Sally Jessy Raphaël
Raphaël at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
Born	Sally Lowenthal[1] (1935-02-25) February 25, 1935 (age 86) Easton, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation	Talk show host
Years active	1959–Present
Spouse(s)	Andrew Vladimir ​ ​ (m. 1953; div. 1958)​ Karl Soderland ​ ​ (m. 1962; died 2020)​
Children	3

Sally Lowenthal (born February 25, 1935), better known as Sally Jessy Raphaël, is an American former tabloid talk show host known for her program Sally (originally titled The Sally Jessy Raphaël Show). ^[2]

Early life[]

Lowenthal was born in 1935 in Easton, Pennsylvania and graduated from Easton Area High School. She also spent time in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where her father, Jesse Lowenthal, was in the rum exporting business and her mother, Zelda Lowenthal (aka Dede Lowry), ran an art gallery. Sally has a younger brother, Steven Lowenthal.^[3]

She spent some of her teenage years in Scarsdale, New York, where one of her first media jobs was at the local AM radio station, WFAS. The station had a program by and for junior high school students and Raphaël read the news. She attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. Raphaël studied acting under the tutelage of Sanford Meisner at New York City’s Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.^[4]

It has been reported that she took her mother's maiden name of Raphaël as her professional name and plucked the theatrical surname of Jessy from her father's family.^{[5][dead link]}

Career[]

Journalism and broadcasting[]

Following her graduation from Columbia University, she became a news correspondent, covering Central America for the Associated Press and United Press International, thanks in large part to her ability to speak both English and Spanish fluently. She also got considerable experience in the media in Puerto Rico, where she worked in both radio and television—one of her jobs was doing a TV cooking show. It was while working in radio that she met the man who became her second husband, Karl Soderlund, who was the general manager of a radio station that hired her. After he was fired, the two left Puerto Rico to work in Miami, Florida. It was while Raphaël was on the air as a radio announcer in Miami that she met and became friends with talk show host Larry King.

By her own admission, Raphaël's broadcasting career was not an immediate success. She told numerous reporters over the years that she bounced around from station to station in both Puerto Rico and the United States, working as a disc jockey, news reporter, and the host of a show where she interviewed celebrities. She refused to give up, even though at one point, she had worked at 24 stations, and was fired from 18 of them. In the early 1980s, she finally got the right opportunity when she was asked to do a call-in advice show on radio. In the late 1980s, she guest starred as herself in The Equalizer episode "Making of a Martyr".

Talk show[]

Raphaël's husband Karl Soderlund assumed the role of her manager, and was a partner in her two biggest successes. She hosted a radio call-in advice show distributed by NBC Talknet which ran from Monday November 2, 1981 to 1987, but is best known for hosting the television talk show, The Sally Jessy Raphaël Show (later shortened to Sally), which ran in first-run syndication from October 17, 1983, to May 24, 2002.^{[citation needed]} "Talknet" was brand new when she came to the attention of producer Maurice Tunick. According to David Richards of The Washington Post, Tunick had auditioned a number of potential hosts, but hadn't yet found the right one. Tunick gave Raphaël a one-hour trial run on NBC's Washington, D.C. affiliate, WRC, in August 1981. Before going on the air, she decided that rather than doing a political show, she would give advice and discuss subjects she knew a lot about, such as relationship problems. Soon, her advice show was being heard on over 200 radio stations, and she developed a loyal group of fans.^[6]

One of those fans turned out to be talk show host Phil Donahue, who happened to hear her show one night and liked how she related to the audience. His encouragement led to a tryout on television, where producer Burt Dubrow gave her a chance to be a guest host on a talk show of his. She was not very polished, but people who had loved her radio show were very positive about her being on TV. Her non-threatening and common-sense manner appealed to Dubrow, who believed she would gain more confidence as she got some TV experience. By mid-October 1983, she was given her own show on KSDK-TV in St. Louis. The Sally Jessy Raphaël Show was only a half-hour, but it was the beginning of her successful career as a talk show host.^{[citation needed]}

Raphaël became known to television viewers for her oversized red-framed glasses, a trademark that began entirely by accident. The source of her famous red-framed glasses goes all the way back to her first broadcast news job.^{[citation needed]} Raphaël had difficulty reading the teleprompter and, with five minutes before air time, quickly went to a store across the street from the studio to purchase a pair of reading glasses. The only one she could find was a red pair. While her bosses disliked them, the audience seemed to think they looked good, so she kept wearing that style from then on.

By 2000, both Raphaël and Springer were in decline. As one media critic observed, Springer's ratings were the lowest they had been in 3 years, but Raphaël's ratings were now the lowest they had been in 12 years. Raphaël was already having problems with her syndicator: she believed that USA Networks Inc. was more interested in doing promotion for Springer, whose show was more popular than hers, and Povich, who had recently left Paramount Television to join USA's syndication arm, than they ever were for her show. She celebrated her 3,500th episode in early 1998. By March 2002, it was announced that after an 18-year run, her show was being canceled. In 2002 Raphaël was named by Talkers Magazine to both their 25 Greatest Radio Talk Show Hosts of all time (she was #5), and the 25 Greatest Television Talk Show Hosts of all time (she was #11). She was one of only three personalities to make both the radio and the TV lists.^[7]

From approximately 2005 to 2008, she hosted a daily radio show, Sally Jessy Raphaël on Talknet (previously called Sally JR's Open House), on the Internet and in syndication to local radio stations. The show's flagship station was WVIE, Baltimore, Maryland and the show aired on AM stations in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, in addition to at least one station in Arizona. The show also aired on XM Satellite Radio's America's Talk channel from November 19, 2007 until its end. The name "Talknet" is a revival of the name of NBC Talknet, the now-defunct radio network that carried her previous radio show from 1981 to 1987. She abruptly ended the show July 7, 2008.

On November 10, 2010, Raphaël, along with former talk show hosts Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake and Montel Williams, were invited as guests on The Oprah Winfrey Show.^[8]

Raphaël offered to induct Rush Limbaugh into the Radio Hall of Fame when he was voted into the Hall in 1993. Surprised by the offer, Limbaugh accepted, only to see Raphaël use her speech to speak out against the vote and excoriate Limbaugh. Paul Harvey used his radio program the next day to defend Limbaugh, who was privately hurt by Raphaël's betrayal; in an act of revenge, one of Limbaugh's staffers slipped a picture of Raphaël without her makeup or trademark glasses (taken from one of Raphaël's staffers, as both hosts worked in the same studio at the time) onto Limbaugh's television program without his knowledge.^[9]

Personal life[]

Sally Jessy Raphaël was married for the first time in 1953, at age 18, to Andrew Vladimir, with whom she had two daughters: Allison and Andrea. Sally also has two grandchildren: Max and Kyle. They divorced 5 years later. One of her daughters from that union, Allison, died on February 2, 1992. Allison was 33 years old, and her death was ruled an accidental overdose because of "combined effects of several prescribed drugs".^[10]

She married Karl Soderlund in 1962. He would later become her manager during her career. They have one son together named Jason. They remained married until Karl's death in 2020.

References[]

External links[]

• Sally Jessy Raphael at IMDb 
• Sally Jessy Raphael at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television